The Brigittine Office

Delving into Kellerbook

This morning someone asked me if I knew of the Brigittine Office, a very old Office in honour of Our Lady. I set off on an exploration.

There is a very handsome copy of the Brigittine Office just recently printed from Syon Abbey here is link

“A Rare Medieval Prayer Book, Brought Up to Date for You”

This claim to update a medieval prayer book strikes me as bold, maybe foolhardy. Maybe I am an oddball as I enjoy singing Latin hymns. I know there are many who much prefer to sing in English, so maybe this is a wise thing to adapt a Rare Medieval Prayer Book to vernacular languages and the intervening reforms to the Divine Office.

To showcase how the adaptations work, they provide a recording of a candle-lit recital of parts of Vespers from the Sisters' breviary in St Mary’s Church. It is accompanied by piano. It follows a workshop, so some of the singers have only just been introduced to the music. It doesn’t really do justice to the music, but it’s a start.

Long ago, there was a webpage called kellerbook.com. Somewhere along the line the page fell out of use and was snapped up by spammers. Fortunately much of it was archived by gregorianbooks.com. Unfortunately many of the internal links are broken. So here is a list of all the Brigittine Office pages I could figure out:

• The Brigittine Office

• The Structure of the Office

• Sunday Lauds

• Sunday Prime

• Terce, Sext and None

• Vespers

• Compline

• Psalm Schema

Turns out, the same Theo Keller who put together kellerbook.com is the one who typeset the music for the Syon Breviary. The introduction in the book uses some of the same tables from the kellerbook website. The music and translation is credited to Rev Brian Foley. Psalm tones from Dom Gregory Murray OSB from Downside Abbey. The copyright statement also mentions Faber Music, and the Psalm texts are from The Grail Psalms.

I’ve written earlier about a book helping to elucidate the Little Office:

A Treatise on the Little Office of Our Lady in turn takes much material from an older work, The Myroure of oure Ladye, which turns out to come from Syon Abbey. It was probably written by Rev Thomas Fishbourne, the first confessor-general of Syon.

So, all in all, it looks like an amazing work. I have bought the e-book and am considering a printed copy as they are heavily discounted right now from Syon Breviary. I don’t know if I would be able to make recordings as there are several different layers of copyright at play.

And here’s a link to the Latin text of the Brigittine Office as published about 1969.